


throw in some truth for atmosphere (but we can see right through you)

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 1920's LA, F/M, Private Detective/Client AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 23:21:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4156821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trouble walked in through Jemma Simmons' door at ten past three in the afternoon and the first thing that she thought was that he had remarkably blue eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	throw in some truth for atmosphere (but we can see right through you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ardentaislinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentaislinn/gifts).



> Happy birthday to the lovely ardentaislinn!!!! Here's hoping that you like this! <3
> 
> Title from "What You Don't Know About Women" from _City of Angels_.

Trouble walked in through Jemma Simmons' door at ten past three in the afternoon and the first thing that she thought was that he had remarkably blue eyes.

Jemma had her feet propped up on her desk, eating a Waldorf sandwich and wondering just how early she could shut up the office for the day, when the man ( _trouble_ , the voice in the back of her head whispered) peered around the edge of her smoked glass door. She set her feet down with a thump and quickly tried to look as professional as possible, hiding her sandwich in the nearest drawer and brushing the crumbs off her pleated skirt.

“Sorry,” the man said, still hovering around the door and nervously shifting from foot to foot. “Are you still open? Your card said nine to five and I've heard that you're--”

“How did you get our card?” Jemma interrupted and narrowed her eyes at him. The Carter Simmons Detective Agency dealt with rather special kinds of cases, the kind that led them down dark alleyways and into underground lairs and occasionally ended in saving major metropolitan areas. 

“A man wearing a suit left it the other night after he heard about my...problem. He said that his name was Phil Coulson?” The man said hopefully.

“Come in, then.” Jemma gestured to the chair across from hers. If Phil had sent him their way, that meant it was an important case, the kind that she'd normally send straight to Peggy Carter, the best detective this side of the Pacific and Jemma's mentor. Only Peggy was on her honeymoon with her new husband, an Army vet named Daniel Sousa with a soft smile and eyes that went even softer whenever he looked at Peggy, and Jemma had been left in charge of the office with the promise that nothing dire happened in the city- in the fall. Clearly, they'd forgotten the fact that dire things were always happening in the City of Angels. “It's just me for now, I'm afraid. How can I help you?”

“My friend disappeared three days ago. She goes off sometimes—meets a movie star, finds a party--so at first I thought it was fine, but then this morning, I got _this_.” He extracted the note from his pocket with only the tips of his fingers, as if it burned him to touch it, and dropped it on Jemma's desk. Typewritten letters on stiff cream card stock, it read _Tonight at midnight, the Diviner, if you want to see your friend again._

“Interesting.” Jemma slid on a pair of grey kid gloves and carefully inspected the card. Higher quality than the usual ransom note, flower faintly embossed on the back of the card—there was someone new on the crime scene and most dangerous of all, someone with class. “Do you happen to have any enemies, Mr...”

“Fitz. Leo Fitz.” He extended his hand, then quickly dropped it when Jemma threw a meaningful glance down at the card in her gloved hands. “No more than the usual in my line of work. I'm, ah...what I do isn't strictly legal.”

“You're a bootlegger,” Jemma guessed. He had the look, uncomfortable in the crisp new clothing that she was willing to bet cost just a little more than he could afford, eyes checking every exit in the room as if he expected the G-men to bust in at any minute. She didn't give a damn what he did for a living and it wasn't as if she observed Prohibition herself (the third file cabinet had a false back which contained all the ingredients for one of Peggy's signature martinis), but his profession could explain quite a lot about this case. “Have you got a secret recipe or something? Anything that a rival might want?”  
“No, it's my partner Mack who makes the gin. I just deliver it. I'm good at designing secret hatches and that kind of thing—really good at it,” Fitz added smugly. “But that's not the kind of thing that people get kidnapped over.”

“In this town, you'd be surprised.” Jemma carefully tucked the card into a manila envelope and labeled it with a code of her own devising. Organization was everything, as was keeping the details of each case confidential. Jemma had been the best at everything since childhood, from reading Dickens in her nursery to her first at Oxford, and unexpected as her profession had been, she was determined to be good at it. She may not have been capable of seducing suspects or cracking people over the head in dark alleyways, like the hard boiled detectives she'd read about while doing research after Peggy had first offered her the job, but at least she had a filing system that was simply the bee's knees. “Where did your friend disappear from?”

“The last time Skye was seen, she was just finishing up her shift at the Aegis Club. She's a singer,” he explained.

“What are you waiting for, then?” Jemma grabbed her coat and cloche, discreetly checking that her pistol was tucked into her handbag. “We're burning daylight.”

During the cab ride over, Jemma noticed Fitz pull a small device out of the pocket of his coat, turning it over and over in his hands and staring intently at it. He poked and prodded at buttons, popped off the back and peered inside at its workings, promptly swore under his breath, and pulled a tool out of another coat pocket to fiddle around with the device more until her curiosity finally got the better of her and she asked what it was. “It's the twin of something I made for Skye,” he replied, not even bothering to look up from it. Jemma felt a faint flare of irritation—he'd barely met her eyes since he'd come into her office, except for a quick, bright blue glance when he came in, and for some unaccountable reason, she wanted him to look at her. “It's a sort of button, something she could press to send a signal to me if she was ever in trouble. Tricky little device but when it works, it works perfectly.”

“Are you sure she's just your friend?” Jemma raised an eyebrow at him. “That's a lot of trouble to go to for something that doesn't always work.”

“For a long time, we were all each other had. I met Skye just after I came to the States...she was singing in this tiny, smoky club, singing with an out-of-tune piano. I fixed the piano, she taught me how to mix a drink, and we've been friends ever since,” Fitz said it like making friends was the simplest thing in the world and, watching the smile that stole across his face when he talked about Skye, Jemma supposed that for him and Skye, it had been. No wonder he'd built that device for her. “I didn't really know what I was doing when I first got here and she sort of took me in.”

“How'd a nice Scottish boy like you end up in a city like this?” Jemma asked and winced as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Clearly, she'd read one too many of those hard boiled detective novels during her lunch shift. “That is...I didn't mean to...I was just curious...I'm always curious—it's how I ended up doing this. Anyway, I--”

“It's fine. My dad died during the Great War, I wanted to stay home and help her out, and my mum wasn't having any of that so she bought me a one-way boat ticket and told me to go to the States and make something of myself. This probably isn't what she imagined but...awfully hard to get an engineering degree when you haven't got the money for college.” He hunched his shoulders inside his jacket, like he was trying to curl up into himself, wrapping his hands together in his lap around the device and fixing his eyes firmly on the floor.

“I've known people with proper degrees who couldn't make something like that in a million years,” she blurted out. She'd gone to school with various over-privileged aristocrats, coasting through Oxford on their family money and connections rather than through any academic merit. 

“Yeah?” he asked. She just echoed him in response and he finally lifted his eyes from the floor to look at her straight-on, grin tugging at the edges of her mouth. “So what's a nice English girl like you doing behind the desk of a detective agency?”

“I was the family disappointment. Nothing for it, but to go to Hollywood, make myself over into someone new. It's the city specialty,” Jemma said lightly as the cab pulled up in front of the Aegis Club, hoping that he wouldn't ask for more details. People, well...people _knew_ her family and the amount of money someone could obtain for selling an exclusive on the chosen profession of the Simmons' youngest daughter was considerable. More than considerable. Thankfully, Fitz changed the subject to the club's security, pointing out the back and side doors (“designed to give the clients a chance for a discreet exit”) and where guards were normally stationed. None of the guards had seen Skye go out, so either her kidnappers had found a different exit or someone had received a huge bribe.

They slipped in through the plush front lobby and descended down a curving staircase to the dance floor, where a slender Asian woman, dressed all in black and thoughtfully sipping a drink, was perched at the bar. “You're late,” she said, back still to them.

“To her, everyone's late,” Fitz whispered in Jemma's ear. He straightened up, brushed off his coat, and then spoke more loudly. “May, this is P.I. Jemma Simmons, of the Carter and Simmons Detective Agency. Miss Simmons, this is Melinda May, the owner of this joint. She's the best in the business.”

“Flattery gets you nowhere,” May said flatly, but Jemma thought that she detected the slightest hint of a pleased look on the older woman's face. “Glad to meet you, Miss Simmons. I've been a great admirer of Peggy's work for years.” Jemma tried very hard to look capable, wishing that she'd thought to borrow some of Peggy's red lipstick before she left office.

“Right then. I was wondering if I could ask your employees some questions, find out if anyone saw anything suspicious,” Jemma said crisply. _Make sure you talk to everyone_ , a voice that sounded awfully like Peggy said inside her head, _it's the people who get noticed the least that see the most._

“Talk to anyone you want, but let me know the moment that you find something out. I promise you, I'll know if you don't,” May warned. “No one kidnaps people from my club and gets away with it.” With that, she turned on her heel and vanished into the shadows of the club, leaving Fitz and Jemma dazed behind her. 

“Well.” After a long silence, Jemma squared her shoulders and tilted her head up to meet Fitz's eyes. “Shall we get to work?” 

They worked their way through half the club until they finally struck gold: Antoine Triplett, the club's pianist, wearing a sharp suit and flashing them a sunny smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. “The joint isn't the same without Skye,” he admitted, running his fingers absently over the piano keys and picking out the chords of a song. “She just...the girl lights up a room like there's no one else in it. You can't look away from her when she's singing or anytime, really. So when those three kept on watching her, I just figured that they saw the same thing as I did. I'm not making that mistake again.” Trip winced, hand coming down hard on a particularly discordant chord, and Jemma realized that he probably blamed himself for Skye's disappearance.

“Can you tell me more about them?” Jemma asked softly. 

“Two men and a woman. She was definitely the one in charge: tiny, curly hair, wearing a flower dress. One of the men was in his forties or so—hair greased all the way back, kind of jowly, had a real tough look to him. The other one was younger, dark hair—he was the one who looked at Skye the longest.”

Jemma frowned: there was something strangely familiar about Trip's descriptions, something nagging at the back of her mind. She knew that she'd never met the men and woman Trip had described, but she could have sworn that she'd somehow heard of them. “Fitz?” she asked suddenly. “Do you think that if Trip described these people in enough detail, you could draw them?” She'd seen the charcoal and pad tucked into the pocket of his trousers earlier and noticed the lone smudge of pencil along the side of his index finger while he was busy not looking at her during the long cab ride over.

Fifteen minutes later, they had three very lifelike portraits and Jemma had a big problem. “Chop one head off, and another grows back,” she muttered.

“Sorry?”

“These three used to be part of a crime syndicate called HYDRA that Peggy took down five years ago. They were supposed to get sent off to the Rock, along with Von Strucker and Zola, but they must have escaped somehow and started up their own organization.” She hadn't been a part of the agency back then, still memorizing equations and fending off suitors in the English countryside, but rumor had it that Peggy had had to borrow a butler and several inventions from Howard Stark, famed inventor, playboy, and thorn in Peggy's side in order to finish them off. After all that trouble, Jemma couldn't help but feel indignant on Peggy's behalf that they had the audacity to show up again. “They're a nasty bunch, from everything I've heard.”

“They must be holed up at the Diviner, if that's where they want me to go,” Fitz said, frowning down at the three portraits.

“Making you come into their space,” Jemma added. “You know, I think someone at City Hall might owe me a favor or two.”

“So we can get the plans for the club, know what we're going up against before we go in. Maybe even set up--”

“A trap for them,” Jemma finished his sentence without even thinking about it. “Exactly.” She nodded up at Fitz, who nodded back at her almost instantly and shot her a small smile. They'd just...well, whatever that was, they had done it and Jemma couldn't help thinking that she'd like it—that easy give-and-take, the thoughts that ran along the same tracks—to happen again. “You know, I was wondering, do you happen to have any experience with making doors? The trap kind?”

“You needed to ask?” Fitz shot back. 

“Are you going to get Skye?” Trip asked and, at their (in-synch) nods, grabbed his hat from the top of the piano and stood up. “Then I'm going too. If you need someone to take out the guards, blow the lights, whatever, I'm your man.”

“He's stuck on her, isn't he?” Jemma whispered to Fitz as they followed Trip out, watching the determined set of the other man's shoulders.

“Since the first time he saw her smile,” Fitz replied. “You hear it in all the songs he plays for her. Don't tell anyone, but one time I caught May looking over at them and smiling.” Jemma laughed, Fitz looked pleased with himself, and Jemma could have almost sworn that she felt something _beginning_ , a tentative understanding stretching between them.

When trouble of an entirely different kind walked into the Diviner five hours later, Jemma Simmons was prepared.

She sat at a table in the back, wreathed in shadows as she nursed her drink and watched Fitz from a distance. They'd agreed to put him up front, at a small table right underneath a spotlight, and right now he looked nervous enough to attract every con man, gambler, and mobster in the joint. They'd done that on purpose too and, sure enough, the moment that the slender woman (Raina, Jemma remembered) walked in, she threw a dismissive glance Fitz's way. Flanked on either side by burly men, Raina walked over to the bar and ordered a drink—she was making Fitz wait, drawing it all out. Obvious move, Jemma thought and barely refrained from rolling her eyes.

Finally, the other woman made her way over to Fitz's table, draping her cape over the back of a chair with a flourish and sliding into the chair that one of her men held out for her, and Jemma leaned forward in her seat in a fruitless attempt to hear better. If all went according to plan, Fitz would demand to see Skye before he handed over the ransom-- “Any bootlegger with half a brain knows to check that the goods aren't damaged before they make a deal”--and once they got out of the crowded club, Jemma and Trip would spring the trap.

And finally, after ten minutes of negotiation that Jemma couldn't hear over the sound of the music, one cigarette, and three unfinished drinks, Raina rose from her seat and gestured for Fitz to follow her. Fitz put his hat on backwards, their signal to go ahead with the plan, and two minutes later, Jemma and Trip followed them.

They went down a dark alley, of course, and then down an even darker flight of stairs and along a damp, moldy hallway lit by a single buzzing bulb and down another flight of stairs as Jemma wondered what on earth mobsters had against clean, well-lit spaces. Far ahead of them, Fitz was talking about bathtub gin while Raina smirked up at him and the younger one of the men unlocked the door, Trip clutched a pen that he promised released knock-out gas, Jemma curled her hand more tightly around the pistol she held at her side and then--

Later, when Jemma remembered it all, the entire fight seemed to play out like film sped up, a series of images flashing across her eyes too fast to catch everything at once. The dark-haired girl who emerged from the locked door had a talent for undoing handcuffs and a wicked right hook, as she burst straight through the door and demonstrated it on one of the henchmen. Fitz didn't, but he had a wickedly sharp knife and a knack for getting out of the way in time. Trip had a pen that worked after all, and good reflexes when it ran out, and Jemma had an eye on every exit. She caught the younger man, the one with dark hair and empty eyes, when he tried to ran and knocked him out with two punches and a knee to his nose. That was when the floor gave way, the trap door that'd been marked in the floor plans she'd found at City Hall finally activating its timed detonator, and Raina went down with a thump, caught in the midst of attempting to make a run for it. Fitz practically crowed in triumph, glancing over at Jemma to make sure that she'd noticed how his plan had worked and beaming when she nodded at him in appreciation, and Jemma felt a strange flare of warmth in her chest at the thought that he'd looked to her for approval almost automatically.

There should have been dramatic speeches, she thought vaguely, declarations from a mustachioed villain that they'd never take them alive, battles that lasted for at least two pages. Someone should have been in deadly peril and according to the rules of the game, Skye had been. But Skye wasn't the sort to let herself be in deadly peril and Jemma herself wasn't the kind to let a fight go on longer than necessary. It was easier and harder, shorter and longer than it should have been and when it was all over, Jemma had two unconscious men at her feet and one very angry handcuffed woman glaring daggers at her. “I suppose we should call the police,” she said eventually. “They'll be rather annoyed if I just leave people on their steps again.” The last time Peggy had done that, Commissioner Coulson had complained that they were ruining the approachable atmosphere of the LAPD. Secretly, Jemma suspected that he had rather enjoyed the mystique of it all.

Nevertheless, they phoned from the Diviner and the police arrived almost immediately, steadfastly ignoring the drunken revelers stumbling out of the club and trying very hard not to look pleased when they spotted the three prisoners. Skye and Trip drifted off into the night, Trip's arm wrapped around her as he insisted on bandaging her bloody knuckles with his tie, and then it was just Jemma and Fitz, alone under the more smoggy than starry sky.

“So,” Fitz asked nervously, leaning up against the brick of the alleyway and looking unfairly handsome under the streetlights. “Could I buy you a drink as a thank you? I mean besides your fee, of course—do you take cash or check?” 

“I'd love to. And cash, I think,” Jemma said. When he extended his hand to her, she took it and wondered if Fitz knew the other meaning of cash or check. _Kiss now or later?_ No matter, Jemma decided, she had a feeling that she'd know by morning.


End file.
